Dear Swing Freak,
I'm not convinced that Pelz personally studied Tour players, as his stats from the early 1980s look just like those from earlier studies in the 1960s and 1970s. I think Pelz has been gathering stats from people who come to his teaching facilities and traveling clinics, but these are by far just amateurs with widely variable handicaps.
I'm also not convinced that today's Tour players are significantly better than earlier players, like Billy Casper, Paul Runyan, Bob Rosburg, and many others. On average, pro golfers between 1980 and 1995 (or thereabouts) improved their putts per round total by a mere 0.5 strokes, and the best bet is that this is almost entirely due to improvements in the putting surfaces on Tour to eliminate uncontrollable variations in grass condition and contouring and pin placement. Over the course of a year, now, greens have improved radically over what they were in the late 1960s and mid-1970s, but putting skill does not seem to have advanced much at all.
One would expect much more significant improvement for the field of players as a whole. The fact that occasionally a pro gets crazy and completes a round with only 21 putts and a score flirting with the sub-60 range is testimony to what is possible with today's greens and putters. Annika Sorenstam certainly has the attitude that she should be putting a LOT better than she does, and that a 54 in tournament play is entirely possible.
In addition, Werner and Grieg in their book
How Golf Clubs Really Work and How to Optimize Their Designs (Jackson, WY: Origins, 2000), are two engineers and clubmakers who studied the various design features of modern putters to determine what if any effectiveness the features contributed to real scoring results. They concluded that NONE of the features made any significant difference except for alignment aids or markings. Basically, they say that all the modern hype about putter designs is almost completely empty marketing sizzle and the old putters used well work just as good. The conflicting variety of modern putter design features, from the Ping heel-toe putters to the Scotty Cameron "potato masher appliance", certainly supports this basic view in that different golfers do well with completely different designs in their hands.
The old sources for Tour stats, like Cochran and Stobbs, Search for the Perfect Swing, and Clyne Solely, How Well Should You Putt: A Search for a Putting Standard (San Jose, CA: Solely Golf Bureau 1977), provide luscious detail about putting performance at the pro level from the 1960s and 1970s, before these radical improvements in greens conditioning and in modern putter designs beginning with Karsten Solheim's Ping putter at the beginning of the 1970s. With slight modification, these stats are still fairly current and applicable to today's pros.
Today, the most robust source of putting stats comes from PGATour.com, which gives two categories of putting stats (total putts and putts per GIR) plus the ShotLink stats on TOURCast (pay per view). I was just discussing the ShotLink stats recently with Sal Johnson, Golf Online's stats guru, and he and I agree that the ShotLink stats gathering is very promising but currently disappointing because of the way PGATour.com presents the data. Even so, you can get glimpses of performance stats for putting by searching Google.com for terms "ShotLink" "Chart" "putt" and "stats", as I have
HERE. The primary stat to watch is "average first putt length," as this integrates those greens hit in regulation with iron approach play from 100 to 200 yards out with picthing and chipping from in close after missing a green. The current Tour average for first putt is outside 20 feet, and pros sink no more than 1 out of 7 from this range. Horton Smith in the 1930s was a lot better than this. There is a
nice analysis and discussion of Pelz's 20+-year-old numbers and today's pro play as shown by ShotLink that basically shows nothing much has changed in the last 20 years on Tour.
I suspect that your sense of improvement comes from watching individual performances. Televised golf always focuses on the leaders, who obviously are having a good day. Network golf never shows anyone who missed the cut after Thursday and Friday play (that's for cable), and only shows the marquee players Saturday and the contenders Sunday. This biases the viewership steadily in favor of a sense that the field as a whole is better than it really is. The marketing phrase "These Guys are Good," probably should be "These Guys We Show You are Good."
Another biasing comes from the magazines, which always show articles and tips of the top players. In putting, this means Roberts, Faxon, Crenshaw, Mickelson, and Furyk. There are players out there with better putting stats at any given season, usually including John Houston, David Toms, and some others like Ben Crane and Stuart Appleby. Marketing has a kind of built-in inertia in it. The same is true for gurus like Pelz -- once seen as a guru, always a guru -- the magazines have a vested interest in perpetuating their annoitments for guruhood to their readers, or else the editors don't look so trustworthy and knowledgable as they need to be to draw in readers for their advertisers.
My study of Tour putting stats shows that year-in and year-out, about one-third of the field gets better than the previous year, one-third stays the same, and one-third gets worse. There is basically a lively churning in the field that generates "noise" and "sizzle", but that's about all. The field as a whole is hardly moving, although it could be.
Watching specific individuals in their putting strikes me as more interesting and informative for the amateur than watching the field averages. As I said above, there is a ton of room for improvement on Tour in putting over the past decades given the radical improvement in pro greens as a whole (Augusta was always superb) and all the gee-whiz technology for putter design and putting coaching available today. Apparently, though, the vast majority of Tour players are flying without putting coaches in the co-pilot seat.
Swing gurus do double duty as putting coaches after having penetrated the protective world of Tour pros, and this is generally not a good thing. Tiger Woods' father barred Butch Harmon from teaching Tiger putting (see the dad's interview in Golf Digest a year or two ago, and Butch is not very knowledgable about putting anyway), and Tiger now relies mostly on Mark O'meara and O'meara's swing coach Hank Haney. Haney basically takes his putting cues from Mark O'Meara. It's no coincidence that Tiger and Mark share about the same bottom-rung putting stats. Annika Sorenstam studies with Dave Strockton Sr on occasion (Cali-folk). Thorpe on the Senior Tour studied with Jerry Barber. Rocco Mediate works on putting with an airline pilot named Rick Sonnier. Stan Utley, the Nationwide Tour putting guru to Jay Haas, visits periodically with Memphis swing guru Rob Akins to get his setup adjusted. Mickelson has studied with Crenshaw and now Pelz. Davis Love's swing coach Jack Lumpkin relies on others, apparently including Mike Shannon, to teach Daivs about the stroke in putting. Last week, Mickelson muffed two 5-footers to drop out of the lead in Phoenix down the final stretch. Stuart Appleby mostly follows his own counsel, as does Furyk and Roberts. Faxon keeps his stuff pretty private, and his "good stuff" has little to do with Bob Rotella or Scotty Cameron thoughts or advice.
This situation creates some interesting mysteries in putting. In 1996 Faldo creditied Craig Farnsworth with his Masters putting, and shortly thereafter his putting plumeted to a rock bottom stinko of 183rd in the stats, where he stayed for for 4 years. In 2000, Nick Faldo still stunk at putting and he met Eben Dennis of Dallas at the Colonial. Dennis gave him one tip and Faldo went on to putt number 1 at Pebble Beach the next month in the 2000 US Open. The media said nothing. Today, Faldo still looks to Farnsworth for help. I spent three days visiting Eben to learn what he has to say, and it basically is nothing more than "point at the hole" when you make the stroke. That's all he said. Paul Azinger, chronically troubled in putting, has been real hot on the greens lately. The only change I know about is visiting a swing teacher in Dallas named Jim Hardy. Does Hardy know anything about putting, or is it just a fluke in Azinger's game? Remember Bryce Molder? The hottest college golfer since Tiger, from Georgia Tech, Stewart Cink's and David Duval's alma mater? He joined Phil Mickelson's Gaylord sports agency and his putting went straight to pot. What's the story there? Wasn't the putting coaching in college any good, and where is the support for putting from his commission-earning agents? Hank Keuhne two years ago was a lousy putter, and this year he's just fine. What changed? Mike Weir putted great last year and this year it seems he's awful -- bagging his putter in favor of a wedge recently. What does his swing coach say?
All this tells me that putting is not receiving good coaching on Tour, and is a matter of hit or miss emanating from swing coaches with limited acumen for teaching putting. The focus is so heavily on the full swing that putting has generally not received the proper level of attention on Tour that it requires. With 200 guys fighting over this year's total purses of $245 million on the PGA Tour (and lots more on ALL pro tours worldwide), this deficiency in the system simply cannot persist. So I expect the Tour average in putting skill to slowly and surely advance, once this problem is overcome.
The current best on Tour from 10 feet is Loren Roberts, at nearly 50% makes. In the Tour average stats, the 6-footer is where the average pro hits 50%, so Roberts is 1.7 times better than average. That's frankly quite a BIG gap. So true putting skills at the highest level are really shown by individuals on a season-long basis, not by a hot streak from a marquee player and not really by Tour averages. Afterall, do you want your game merely good enough to stack up with the average pro, or do you want to play at the highest possible level? If your answer is the latter, then watch the steady-rolling individuals.
Cheers!
Geoff Mangum
Putting Theorist and Instructor
Geoff Mangum's PuttingZone
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